Enter the Dragon King

May 2009

For more than three decades, the fourth Dragon King of Bhutan steered his people into the modern world, while keeping their traditional culture intact. His recent abdication, at 53, in favor of his 29-year-old, Oxford-educated son, was another stroke of Realpolitik, strengthening the throne even as he moved the country to a parliamentary democracy. In a rare privilege for an outsider, the author joins the royal family at the coronation of Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the new ruler of the world’s last Himalayan kingdom.

On a bitterly cold day last winter, high in the eastern Himalayas, the king of Bhutan voluntarily gave up his throne. Watched by his fiercely patriotic people, the fourth Druk Gyalpo, or Dragon King, took the Raven Crown, a ceremonial headpiece with Tantric skulls stitched around the rim, surmounted by an embroidered raven’s head, and placed it on the head of his eldest son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. The new king, a charismatic 29-year-old with a hairstyle that recalls Elvis Presley’s, is not your typical Himalayan monarch. Nor is Bhutan—the world’s last surviving Himalayan Buddhist kingdom, and an odd but successful mixture of ancient and modern—a country like any other. On the night of the coronation my wife, Meru, and I were having a quiet after-party at the Aman Hotel, in the capital, Thimphu, with some members of the Indian delegation, when their security detail went on sudden alert. Agents from New Delhi with spaghetti in their ears sized up an incoming group of Bhutanese men. The men turned out to be security agents, too. “Papa 2 clear,” said one of the Bhutanese, talking into a microphone hidden in the long sleeve of his traditional robe, as if it were an old-fashioned speaking tube. I thought that “Papa 2” might be code for “Prince 2,” because the flurry of activity marked the arrival of His Royal Highness Prince Jigyel, the new king’s brother, who had that day become heir-presumptive to the crown of Bhutan.

The 24-year-old Jigyel, an Oxford graduate who dodged bullets with his father while fighting Assamese insurgents in the country’s southern jungles in 2003, typifies the incongruities of Bhutan. Dressed in impeccable black shoes, knee-length socks, and a gray robe, Prince Jigyel had dropped by the hotel to say hello to a guest—Nakata, the Japanese football star and fashion model, who is known as “the Asian David Beckham.” For the prince, it had been an emotional day. That morning, he had watched his father, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, formally abdicate after 34 years as king. “When I saw His Majesty put the Raven Crown on my brother’s head,” Prince Jigyel told me later that evening, “I didn’t know whether to cry from happiness or from sadness.” It was instinctive for the prince to refer to his father in this reverential, regal way: “He’s the man behind the man. We think of him almost as a god.” Jigyel’s sister Princess Chimi was similarly moved: “I had never seen the Raven Crown before.”

The invitation to the coronation had come from the senior queen of Bhutan, and had reached us in London on a dank October day. It was unexpected, because coronations in Bhutan are usually closed to foreigners, but the queen told me I had been invited to witness the event because the retiring king and the crown prince both liked the books I had written on the history of Tibet and the Himalayas. Despite having little time for the monarchy in my own country, England, I was impressed with the Bhutanese version. The “old king” was in fact only 53, but his 34-year reign had been remarkable by any measure, and he now hoped to see the Raven Crown pass securely to the next generation. Having inherited the job as a teenager after the death of his father, he married four beautiful sisters, sired 10 children, and steered Bhutan into the modern era with extraordinary skill. He introduced effective health-care and education systems, banned Western-style buildings in favor of local designs, refused to let forests be chopped down indiscriminately, and introduced “appropriate technology,” such as Japanese power tillers, which were sold cheaply to Bhutanese farmers. Rather than build smoke-belching power plants or shun electricity altogether, he introduced hydroelectric schemes which now earn Bhutan substantial revenues by selling surplus power to India. (The king once observed, “Water is to us what oil is to the Arabs.”) Then, to coincide with his abdication, the king decided to introduce parliamentary democracy to Bhutan—this against the wishes of many of his loyal subjects, who seemed quite content with Bhutan’s form of benevolent monarchy. In any case, the distance traveled by Bhutan during the old king’s tenure on the throne is truly astonishing. At the time of his own father’s coronation, in 1952, Bhutan had no bridges or roads, and two foreign guests (an Indian political agent and a Sikkimese prince) had to make a nine-day journey from northeastern India to Thimphu by mule.

Modern transportation makes a difference in Bhutan, but only up to a point. To enter Bhutanese airspace is to enter another world. The plane cruises at the height of the Himalayan peaks. To your left you pass Cho Oyu, Mount Everest, and Makalu, each summit spiking in a web of frosted snow and giving way to yet more distant summits, the shining whiteness becoming a filigree of ice trails as your eyes fall to the lower ridges and then to stepped fields and trees—the last great undestroyed forests of the Himalayas. You bump on air pockets as the plane turns at last into a valley and makes its way toward earth. Few scheduled flights come to Bhutan, and those that do need visibility: if the weather turns nasty, instruments won’t suffice to guide you safely to the runway. Rather, the pilot must look for a particular red house on the center of a particular ridge, then skim within 80 feet of its roof in order to land on the lone strip of tarmac in a hayfield beyond. The terminal building, ornate and tiered, might be mistaken for a temple—a testament to classic Bhutanese architecture. Every house in Bhutan must be traditionally built, and the national costume—a smart, multicolored, striped gho—is compulsory during office hours.

Bhutan is the most intact traditional society I have ever seen. Tourism is highly restricted and reserved mainly for the wealthy; if paparazzi arrive in the wake of a Hollywood or Bollywood star, their visas are withdrawn and they are sent home. It is the only country that has “Gross National Happiness” as a mandated government policy. Bhutan has held itself together—sometimes at significant human cost—by keeping aliens and ethnic impurity at bay, even as its neighbors have been fatally undone. Tibet was destroyed by Chinese Communist rule. Nepal has been run by revolutionary Maoists, after the royal family was massacred by the doped-up crown prince in 2001. Neighboring Sikkim became the 22nd state of the Indian union when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi annexed it, in 1975. Bhutan is still Bhutan, in part because it has taken a hard line. When a census was conducted in the late 1980s and tens of thousands of Nepali speakers were discovered to be living in the southern part of the country, they were expelled by force, although some had been there for three or four generations. Many of those expelled are still living in squalid refugee camps.

Arrangements for the coronation were handled by an official who rejoiced in the title “Head, Office of Protocol for Their Majesties the Queens,” a designation that can exist in no country other than Bhutan. The queens had graciously provided us with a driver and a palace protocol officer. From the airport we drove along a hillside road past deodars and blue pines to Thimphu, which has doubled in size during the past four years and now has nearly 100,000 inhabitants. (There are fewer than 700,000 Bhutanese in all, and although many nominally live below the poverty line, forestry and farming ensure a good, if tough, life.) On the way, the protocol officer said to me, “Do you have a lot of hooligans in England?” “What kind of hooligans?” I asked. “Football hooligans. I once saw a film about them, and I couldn’t believe it.” For the Bhutanese, who rival the Japanese in their concern for courteous formality and exquisite good manners, hooliganism is unimaginable. Bhutanese manners are so refined that it can be hard to tell if you’re having an argument.

An honor guard at the coronation ceremony. Photograph by Lynsey Addario.

A smartly dressed military officer named Captain Karma appeared at our hotel. Clicking his heels, he announced that we were summoned to tea with the senior queen. We were whisked up a steep hill through a series of security barriers to the palace compound. (Each of the four sister-queens has her own palace, but the king chooses to live in a simple, secluded log cabin, to which no one but his family has access.) Her Majesty Ashi Dorji Wangmo, at 53 the eldest queen, was elegant and relaxed. She had just returned from a ceremony at the dzong, or castle, in Punakha, a day’s drive away. “It was magnificent, like going back in time,” she said. “All the royal siblings were there, even the ones who are at school in Switzerland, and the ministers and chief justice and the central monastic body. His Majesty received the blessing from Shabdrung, like all the rulers of Bhutan had before him—the white, yellow, red, green, and blue silk scarves.”

His Holiness Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal was an exceptionally expeditious religious and military figure who came from central Tibet and effectively created the Bhutanese state, in the 17th century, by uniting rival kingdoms and warring monastic communities. “But His Holiness died,” I said, “three or four hundred years ago … ”

“We say that he is ‘resting,’ and we treat him as if he were alive,” the queen explained. “The chamberlain takes Shabdrung meals and betel nut each day, and water for his hands and face. His Majesty was in the presence of his remains, his holy relic.”

The queen is descended from a reincarnation of this seminal Bhutanese figure. The old king’s marriage to the four sisters thus ensured that any potential distrust between the royal family and the family of the nation’s founder was dissolved. The two lines are now physically embodied, for the first time, in the person of Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the new king.

After studying at Cushing Academy, in Massachusetts, and Magdalen College, Oxford, the crown prince returned to his country to prepare for the advent of constitutional monarchy. Not surprisingly, he had become one of Asia’s most eligible bachelors. Like many Bhutanese he is an avid player of basketball, a sport popularized by his father during his bachelor days, when the women of Thimphu would come and watch in the hope of catching his eye. The new king is sociable and perceptive, with interest in photography and history. An Oxford friend remembers him drinking with Japanese students, and another recalls his nervousness when called upon to meet the British royal family. On a recent visit to Thailand, he was besieged by swooning female admirers. The Thai government ordered Web sites to remove what they regarded as disrespectful photos of him.

The new king is not, however, available. “His mothers would like to be assured of the next generation,” said the queen, on behalf of all the old king’s wives. “But he cannot marry a foreign person. It’s in the constitution—that not only the king, but all his royal siblings, must marry a Bhutanese.”

This new democratic constitution, the brainchild of the retiring king, brims with startling bits of Himalayan wisdom. For instance, prisoners are allowed conjugal visits—provided that one of the parties has been sterilized. Speaking to a retired official, the 84-year-old Dzongpen Kado, I asked what he thought of the outside world he saw on television. (Shows popular in Bhutan include American Idol, Ugly Betty, and, inevitably, Friends. You can also watch The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, though what the Bhutanese make of the monologue I cannot say.) “In other countries,” he said, “people seem more free. Either they don’t have rules, or they don’t follow rules. I think they are not afraid of killing each other. Here, people kill each other, but usually if they are drunk and have a fight.” At a state banquet, I met Bhutan’s chief of police and asked him what the national homicide rate was. “About 15 people a year,” he said. His biggest concern was the new—imported—practice of sniffing gasoline and solvents. “I go on television every night and advise our young people against it. They call me ‘Uncle Chief.’”

On the day of the coronation, Meru and I made our way before dawn through the security cordons. It was a frosty morning, and about 60,000 people—nearly 10 percent of the country’s population—had arrived in Thimphu to celebrate. Among the milling guests was a selection of foreigners dressed in approximations of Bhutanese costume, with some sporting medals or emblems. William Randolph Hearst II, grandson of the original Citizen Kane, was clad in the gho and long boots of a dasho, or government official. Normally reclusive, Hearst had come from his home in Hawaii with his new wife, Yudren. (She is Anglo-French but was raised in a Buddhist center in France.) He told me his backstory: “I was still waiting for the bus, and the whole Haight-Ashbury thing came along. I got on the bus, I opened my mind, opened my heart to the Kool-Aid thing. I was initiated by a teacher in India in third-eye meditation. I always knew I would come to Bhutan, and when I did for the first time, I felt an inner cosmic hug. Yudren has a past-life connection with this place.” Hearst outlined a complicated story involving Wilhelm Reich’s orgasm therapy, a tattoo of a double-headed dorje, or thunderbolt, and a film treatment set in the Himalayas.

At the dzong in Thimphu—a large white-washed castle on a rise overlooking the city—one wall had been covered with a gargantuan thangka, or religious flag. I stood with a crowd of foreign ambassadors who had come from New Delhi, and watched as guards wrapped in yellow-and-blue-checkered shawls stamped their feet to keep warm. They were carrying broadswords at their waist, signifying that they were trusted to bear arms in the presence of the monarch. Over the next few hours, an ever evolving cavalcade appeared in the thin light: barefoot dancers in dreadlock wigs, who whirled themselves across the frozen stone; men-at-arms in steel cloche helmets with iridescent earmuffs; a procession of archers; an officer dragging a reluctant white ram with an auspicious third horn growing out of its nose; and a line of men carrying giant flag umbrellas, one with a sharpened pole secured in a leather holder at his waist, which enabled him to spin the umbrella at speed.

On the flat roof of the Throne Room, Buddhist monks in tall red hats blew long copper horns to signal the arrival of the royal party. First came the old king, then the four queens and other members of the royal family. Next came the Indian delegation, envoys from the local superpower: India’s figurehead president, Pratibha Patil, and the power behind the throne, Sonia Gandhi, together with her children, Rahul and Priyanka, and Priyanka’s husband, Robert Vadra. After Indian independence, in 1947, Bhutan’s defense and foreign relations came under the control of New Delhi, but two years ago the old king renegotiated the treaty and Bhutan is now—in theory at least—in full control of its own affairs.

Finally, at 8:21, the precise minute chosen by astrologers, the sun came up over the dzong and a blinding light hit the courtyard. The dapper and confident young king strode down a red carpet decorated with designs of dyed rice. He turned before the Throne Room, walked toward Sonia Gandhi, and to the surprise of everyone greeted her with an air kiss, which momentarily melted her famous reserve. Sonia is not someone many people would dare to kiss. It was November 6, and behind me, I heard a young Bhutanese woman whisper, “America has a black as president, and we have a new king. It is history.”

Monks blowing prayer horns. Photograph by Lynsey Addario.

One ancient ritual followed upon another: an attendant handing each of us a walnut, a pear, a slice of sugarcane, and a palmful of saffron milk; lines of bowing monks offering the monarch silk scarves; the chief abbot, the portly Je Khenpo, waving incense and passing sacred objects (an auspicious knot, a “fish of wisdom,” a conch) to the king to hold to his heart for empowerment; and, most moving of all, the Raven Crown being placed upon his head by his father, both men stiff with emotion. When it was my turn to present a white scarf to the new king, now seated upon his throne, I was surprised by how calm he seemed. As if he had all the time in the world, he discussed a book I had written on Francis Younghusband and his 1904 expedition to Tibet, and asked whether I was having a good stay in Bhutan. I was. “And you,” I inquired, “are you having a happy day?” Leaning forward so that the raven on his crown nodded at me like a sentinel, he said, “Yes, yes, I am!”

Not long afterward the old king approached us, unassuming and graceful, and extended an invitation to lunch. It was extraordinarily intimate—the royal children, the Gandhis, the queens, all eating yak sausages, wood-ear mushrooms, and buckwheat pancakes. I spoke to a retired Indian diplomat who said, “You know what happened to the British High Commissioner at the last coronation? The Bhutanese wanted to entertain themselves, so they asked him if he wanted to try some archery. He took a bow, wobbled, and shot one of the staff in the leg. The fellow pulled out the arrow and roared with laughter: that’s Bhutanese humor for you.”

The new king, meanwhile, was greeting his subjects by the thousands at a local stadium. Some Bhutanese were so amazed they could not speak; old men in battered boots and tattered robes bowed before him; babies were presented; mothers, weather-beaten and grimy, their teeth red and corroded from chewing betel nut, sought his benediction. He said in a speech: “Throughout my reign I will never rule you as a king. I will protect you as a parent, care for you as a brother, and serve you as a son. I shall give you everything and keep nothing.” When I thought of the British monarchy—our aging Queen, the glum Prince of Wales, and his feckless sons, who at that moment were buzzing around South Africa on an “off-road dirt-bike endurance rally”—I felt something like shame.

Queen Ashi Dorji Wangmo told me that the old king had been planning Bhutan’s political transformation for years. “The preparation goes back to 1981—that’s when he introduced the decentralization process. He always wanted full democracy, but he does things systematically. He’s a master strategist.” A conversation with Prince Namgyel, the last surviving son of the second king of Bhutan, left me with a similar impression. An impeccable old man with closely cropped white hair, he told me, “His late Majesty said, ‘If they ask for democracy, don’t give it to them, because it will be too late: better to give it to them before they ask for it.’ That is what has happened.” Prince Jigyel put it another way: “‘When the clear sky breaks, the storm will come.’ That’s the way my father looks at this. He saw the clear sky, and he made the transition.” Ironically, this canny transfer of authority to his son and to democratically elected politicians has left the family of the Dragon King in a stronger position than ever. Recognizing the symbolic power of renunciation, most of Bhutan’s new M.P.’s and ministers emphasize their own humility and respect for the monarchy rather than engaging in the more usual forms of political self-promotion. How long this will last is open to question.

For the moment, the last Himalayan kingdom lies in the care of a charming, untested 29-year-old. “What is he like?,” I asked the king’s sister Princess Chimi. “Tell me a story that illustrates his character.” She thought for a while, then said, “When my sisters and I first came to study in the U.S.A., we had a big culture shock, and he heard we were sad, so he drove over from Cushing Academy with a load of helium balloons. We all thought, Oh, we should have gone to him! He’s very sensitive; he loves animals. I remember when we were small, a grasshopper died and we brothers and sisters were so worried about it. So His Majesty arranged a burial of the grasshopper.”

My thoughts flashed to the problems of nearby countries—Tibet, Pakistan, Nepal—and to what Bhutan may be up against in the globalizing world of the 21st century. The fifth Druk Gyalpo may wish to care for his people as a brother, and to serve as a son, but he will also have to rule, like his predecessors, as a wily practitioner of Realpolitik. Given his father’s record, and his own training since birth, I rate his chances high.

Patrick French’s authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is (Knopf), won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in biography.